[lug] Interesting Crash Report

[David]

Well, I do not now if what follows really is interesting; but it has
consumed my time quite effectively.  At one point it occurred to me
that the damage might be due to a virus.

I turn off my machine at the end of each day, and re-boot the next
time I want to use it; I am using RedHat 6.2.  Last evening I shut
down, essentially normally; although I did notice that statd failed,
whatever that means, and I was having some problem with communicating
with my ISP immediately before shutting down.

This morning I could not log in.  The software came up properly to the
point of the login prompt; but that was it; thereafter I could not log
in as anybody; there are three accounts, including root, on my
machine.  I did not try booting from a floppy because the machine had
booted.

I have a "spare" installation of Linux on another disc, so I was able
to get going.  I poked around looking for files that were altered
yesterday; and, sure enough, /bin/login was dated Mar 19 and the ls
entry looked different from that in the spare Linux.  I copied over
the spare, re-booted, and everything appears to be fine.

Here is the original login entry (the .orig I added before doing the
copy), I do not have user 500, nor group 500:

-r-sr-xr-x   1 500      500         20452 Mar 19 22:43 login.orig*

And here is the copied entry, that works; it is dated Mar 7 2000 in
the spare Linux.

-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root        20452 Mar 20 22:08 login*

Any comments?  What does the stat daemon do?